Chris Mooney - World Without End

"After that, I want a standard surveillance rig, just in case. Might as well cover all the bases. The girlfriend, Kaufmann, she's staying at the Renaissance Hotel in Amsterdam."

Lee's eyes brightened.

"You're shitting me. That's where Cole is staying. He's heading up the Fletcher gig."

Malcolm Fletcher was the name of a renegade FBI profiler responsible for the death of one of Jonathan Cole's men, Victor Dragos. Cole was leading the hunt.

"I'll call Mr. Cole and tell him to pay Ms. Kaufrnann a visit and see what she knows," Bouchard said.

"You have the woman's apartment bugged?"

"Her place and this place. She called him just a few minutes before you got here, then Riley hung up on her. I heard the whole thing.

We've got it on tape. Now we've got to talk about the Russians."

"We'll talk about it later."

"No, we've got to talk about it now. We've got to find a way to get out from under them. These guys are fucking animals. They're not like the Italians. La Cosa Nostra, those guys are dangerous motherfuckers, but they operate by a strict code and have a certain sense of honor, but Misha and his gang… Misha's talking about how he and his buddies took turns beating the shit out of this fifteen-year-old prostitute.

She lost one of her eyes and is in a wheelchair for the rest of her life and Misha's standing there in front of me laughing it up."

"Maybe it's time we introduce Cole to Misha."

"He won't do it." Lee considered a private thought, and then added,

"Cole is unstable. You do realize this."

"I realize he's a major liability. You tired of playing his house boy?"

"You know I am."

"Then we'll work something out."

"Like what?"

"It's time to take Cole out of the picture."

"Sure, why not. It's not like our plate's full."

"I'm serious," Raymond said.

"I'll bring him here and wipe him out."

"Right now, I'm more concerned about the Russians."

"I'm working on it," Bouchard said, and felt the anger he had been nursing for the past four years rise to the surface. He looked at the clock mounted on the wall above the mantel. It was late. He realized he hadn't eaten.

"I'm going out for a while," he said.

"I'm going to turn my phone off. I don't want to be disturbed."

"You've got a transmitter in your phone. If there's a problem, I know how to find you," Lee said and got to work.

A celebration: Dinner at the excellent Aujourd-hui at Boston's Four Seasons Hotel. The maitre d' sat Raymond at a private corner table that overlooked the restaurant's long, wide room of matronly diners and offered a second floor window view of the spectacular Public Garden. He ordered quickly, taking the wine steward's suggestion for a bottle of red that would complement the main course of beef. When the wine came, Raymond declined the obligatory first taste, telling the steward abruptly that it was fine, knowing his tone was rude. Raymond didn't care. He wanted to be left alone.

Wine in hand, he settled back into the soft comfort of his high-back chair, his eyes wandering the room, taking in the people. A lot of the patrons were twenty something men all of them multimillionaires from hot Internet startups, what he called New Money. But the other selection, the Old Money crowd, the crowd Raymond had grown up with, dominated the room. Distinguished older cock-suckers dressed in their stale Brooks Brothers suits, dining with their wives, who had sliver hair and saggy tits and faces stretched tight from plastic surgery.

Some of the women were noticeably younger, their beauty a sharp contrast in the sea of weathered, lined faces.

Cunts, all of them.

Raymond loved the way the word sounded inside his head. Cunts. Tits.

The rhythmic language of cretins and the uneducated. Growing up, he had never been allowed to use such words in his daily speech; he still didn't. But his interior life was vastly different than the one he projected to others. He often bridled when he heard such words spoken out loud.

Well, that wasn't exactly true.

He said cunt several times when thinking about Toni, now his ex-wife.

That was coming up on three years now. Toni-the-Cunt was the reason why he was in this mess with the Russians. The memory was there, always there mental herpes that refused to go away.

Toni had come from serious family money. She never had to hold a full-time job not unless you considered attending society and political functions and ass-kissing an occupation. Her only dream, the same swan song of all women, was to have kids. She had been married once, and when they tried to have kids, they found out she had fertility problems. The guy up and left. The problem was Toni liked to eat and her figure reflected it.

When she turned thirty-six, her biological clock already on its downward spiral, the unmarried hag had secretly started exploring artificial insemination and adoption. Her father, a man who had been raised in a world of privilege in New Orleans and had gone on to become one of those blue-blood lawyers who had invested wisely in real estate and the stock market, had discovered his daughter's plans. Artificial insemination? Have you lost your goddamn mind, woman? Children need a father in their lives. You can't find a man on your own, then that's the Lord's way of telling you it ain't meant to be.

Toni threatened to go ahead and do it anyway. Pops threw his trump card: If she went ahead and had a baby without being married, the allowance would be cut off, and she would not see one penny of the family fortune. The only thing Toni loved more than her dream of having a family was her daddy's money and the lifestyle it provided her.

She was just pushing thirty-nine when they met at a society function, and Raymond was already into his mid-forties, established and doing well, but not well enough to live the sort of lifestyle he felt a man of his intellectual stature deserved. He had been born into it, had sampled the life to the age where he was old enough to appreciate it, and it could still have been his if his pathetic excuse for a father had learned to manage his business.

Or maybe it would have turned out differently if you hadn't married Janet. Another one from the Cunt Express. Married when they were both twenty-three, they had relatively nothing in common except not wanting children and demanding the finer things in life. Time marched on, and when Raymond's CIA salary didn't provide the life Janet wanted, the rift between them grew. After eight years of marriage with a missing husband who worked nights and weekends and had secret affairs, she left, taking with her the house and car and a good chunk of his salary.

The judge, of course, was a woman. Cunts always stuck together so naturally, Janet got everything, and he got stuck with the massive credit-card debt and worked to pay for her fucking tennis lessons and facials.

And now here came the plump and needy and ridiculously rich Toni looking for the same love she sought from her overbearing father. When it came to spotting a good opportunity, Raymond was like a shark sensing blood in the water. Toni, he knew, could be molded and managed. Raymond had molded operatives for a living; he knew how to play the part, how to press down on a nerve and when to ease up. She liked the fact that he was a founding partner for an e-business consulting company called Bradfield (she would never know he was CIA); she responded to his good looks and charm. Her eyes lit up like a pinball machine when he started in on how much he loved kids.

The vasectomy was a simple procedure performed right in the doctor's office. Snip-snip, and a few weeks later no sperm.

Toni didn't know about it. Sure, there was that period of four weeks when he couldn't have sex because of a pulled groin, but after Raymond got the doctor's go-ahead, he jumped back into the part, doing it to her every night, even coming home early from work to service her (and that's exactly what it was, with those wide hips and lumpy white skin, he had to close his eyes every time and think of that woman he was seeing, that pretty thing with the long blond hair and an ass and tits that made your hands ache with want). Then he did the doctor thing, even going inside the bathroom to produce sperm for testing. Raymond had the sample in his coat pocket, given to him by one of his men. The test results were fine. He didn't have a problem. He was fertile.